portland

Here’s some great events coming up the first week of February for Portland Startup Week! Are you planning on attending any of these or others during the week? Let me know of other good events related to Portland Startup Week and I’ll get those posted too.

I’ll be attending the hackfest and hope to team up with anyone that has been hacking IoT or other hardware and wearables to try to put together something new – or even to discuss what we might build in the future. Either way, it should be a great time and I look forward to teaming up with people to build some awesome.

Here’s the letter, it’s kind of LOLz! I know it’s tough to find .NET Developers (or replace .NET with Java Developers or X Enterprise Language), so CIOs, CTOs and others take note. Here’s what I experience and what I see all the time, embodied in a letter. I will put effort into hooking people up with good jobs, that fit the person, and persons that fit the job, but lately I’ve seen companies that do .NET work in the Portland, Seattle and especially San Francisco areas become exceedingly desperate for .NET Developers. This is what my general response looks like.

“Hello Recruiter Looking for .NET Developer(s), thanks for reaching out to me, however I regret to inform you that I don’t know a single .NET Developer in Portland Oregon looking for work. It seems all the .NET Developers have either A: gone to work for Microsoft on Node.js Technologies, B: switched from being a .NET Developer to a Software Developer or otherwise C: left the field and don’t want to see any software ever again (which always makes me sad when people burn out, but alas, hopefully they find something they love). It’s a funny world we live in.

Even though I’m fairly well connected in Portland, Seattle, Vancouver (BC) and even San Francisco it is rare for me to meet someone who wants to do pure .NET Development. If there is I’ll connect them with you. However if you know a company that is porting away from .NET, building greenfield applications in Node.js, Ruby on Rails or other open source stacks I have a few software developers that might be interested.

Cheers”

Even though this letter is geared toward recruiters looking for coders, there is another letter that I’d like to write to a lot of other companies, that goes something like this,

“Dear Sir or Madam At X Corp Enterprise,

Please realize that lumping a person into the position you’re requesting (.NET Developer) is a career limiting maneuver for many in the occupation of software developers. We software developers are people who solve problems, it happens that we do this with code written on computers. The computers execute that code for us thus resolving the problems that you face. This helps X Corp Enterprise do business better! It’s a great relationship in many ways, but please don’t limit our future careers by mislabeling us.

Also, we’re not resources. That’s just a scummy thing for a human to call another human. Thanks for reading this letter, have a great day at X Corp Enterprise!”

I’d be happy to refer .NETters (or Javaers or COBOLers or RPGers or whatever), but seriously, it seems to be a lost cause out there, even more so for mid-level or beginning developers. Barely a soul is looking for a job as a .NET Developer, but I know a few that look for jobs as software developers every couple of weeks.

Speaking of which, if you are looking for work and you want a filtered list of the cool companies and related information of who to work for in Seattle, Portland or elsewhere in Cascadia reach out to me and let me know who you are. I’m more than happy to help you filter through the mine field of companies and job listings. Cheers!

Why did I create a Portland docker logo? Because tomorrow is the Portland docker user group meet up. RSVP the group and check it out. I won’t be able to make this meet up but I will be attending and participating regularly. It’s at New Relic, so easy to find, great views and epic tech to discuss. Let me know how it goes.

On December 3rd, which I hope to be able to attend, it’s Docker Global Hack Day! Check out more by following the @dockerhackday and log into IRC and join #docker. Happy hacking, cheers!

Like this:

There are a number of new startups that have joined the third PIE Class. However there are a few that have stood out to me.

The first startup has to do with the IoT. IoT stands for Internet of Things. I’m a MASSIVE fan of what is being done with IoT. Personally I think it should be the space to watch in regard to the next big moves and big shifts in technology. From a market perspective, there’s some legitimate reasons to watch the IoT space from that view too.

Smart Mocha

With that, Smart Mocha caught my eye immediately. The description reads “Connects monitoring/measurement devices to the Internet of Things, enabling greater and more efficient access to critical data.” Their first product is Sense Simple, which is an “out of box” sensor network. This is interesting, being that existing systems that do what their Sense Simple offering does, are:

Dramatically more expensive, easily 10x or more.

Complexity in existing systems introduces vastly more points of failure, maintenance issues and other concerns.

Often not as capable for integration into other systems, Sense Simple already has “cloud control” – which is a control and device diagnostic tool to provide remote views of the sensor network.

As I mentioned above, integration with existing industry standard sensors and the ability of the company to expand this product in the future already exceeds most of the existing offerings in the space. An example, just based on the cell gateway and cloud based control, provides a prime avenue to expand into the API space to provide even more ways to track, report and log data.

Orchestrate.io

The tag line says it all, “Add Features, Not Databases”. Orchestrate.io have designed a simple API, idiomatic client drivers as their site states. All of which enables you to get started trying tout Orchestrate.io rapidly. The goal of Orchestrate.io is to remove the need to manage a disparate array of databases and to instead focus on the data, what you want to do with the data and to develop solutions against that data. Being that it is offered as a Service akin to PaaS, IaaS and other styles of offerings, it provides the ability for you to pay for only what you use.

In today’s marketplace this is extremely ideal for a number of companies and becoming even more ideal for existing companies, legacy data and more. Got data? Check out Orchestrate.io and see if it works for you.

Summary

IoT: As I was writing above, IoT is definitely shaping up to be a huge deal in the near future. Many industries are moving back to make progress in the physical realm akin to the migrations from ‘foot travel’ to ‘horse travel’ to ‘rail travel’ to ‘air travel’. We’re going to see some huge leaps here, maybe something along the lines of ‘human vision’ to ‘augmented vision’ to ‘perceptual planes vision’. Do you even know what ‘perceptual planes vision’ is? If not, get ready for the future, things might get bumpy! Smart Mocha looks to be positioned in a good place for impact.

Big Data, Data and more data: I’m under the impression I don’t need to elaborate on the notions of big data, but I will. Data has become a major differentiator, more so than even 5-10 years ago. Data has also become an even greater pain while becoming this major advantage. From genomic research to full tracked telemetry data to high volume high scale high quality printing, our new world of big data is here to stay. Orchestrate.io can help you wrap this realm up.

Disclosure: I don’t work for either of these companies, nor am I paid by the city of Portland, but they’re on my radar as I watch Portland’s startup scene and culture. I also live and breath the culture here, I am a Portlandian. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks as other incubators and startups keep rocking and rolling here in the city of Portland, OR.

Upon arriving I checked in and got the super sweet water bottle that the OS Bridge team got for speaker gifts. Gotta say good job, something a bit different, something that’s quality and something worth keeping! I dig it. I immediately washed it out and carried it around for thirst quenching the rest of the day.

Kicking Impostor Syndrome in the Head

This talk tackled the ideas of how to be more inclusive, allow people to actually gain buy in and confidence in the work they’re doing. This is a hugely important set of ideas that most of the large corporate world has no clue about. Thus the dramatically lower productivity, individual leadership, pride and happiness that people have working in large corporate enterprises & especially Government. This is a space that should be an extremely high priority for those businesses to study.

Mistakes…

Denise Paolucci did a great job engaging the crowd and relaying the ideas of how to improve work environments to really bring out the best in people. Simply, it occurred to me this could be summarized as, “Don’t be a dick, how to kick ass, and build the whole team to do just that!”

The talk included ideas such as making it safe to fail, don’t scapegoat someone around an idea that doesn’t work, but try a new path and move toward succeeding. Don’t setup people to fail, because that drags everybody down. Document things even when everybody supposedly knows those things. The list goes on, but that’s a good base for the ideas.

This session was presented by Joe Eames @josepheames. I really wanted to go check this out, as I’ve been keen on AngularJS the last couple months but have not been able to work with it as much as I’d like to. So any exposure is good exposure in my book. This is when the bad news kicked in, I had to run off and take care of some minor priorities. Errands, ugh.

For those like me, that either weren’t at OS Bridge or missed this session, this one will be put up live at some point so keep an eye out for the videos being posted. For an immediate fix, Joe has a podcast at JavaScript Jabber. He’s also got a site related to doing TDD & JavaScript at Test Driven JS.

The standard mode of arrival at OS Bridge.

DIY Electric Vehicles

My friend, beverage connoisseur and JavaScripting genius Jerry Sievert @jerrysievert strolled by and mentioned DIY Electric Vehicles, DIY Electric Cars, DIY Electric Bikes and DIY DIY DIY DIY Stuffs. So I packed and headed to this workshop without any original plan to attend anything at this time.

This was a solid session with an introduction to electric vehicles, what they look like, how they work, what types of batteries are good for this use and coverage of Benjamin Kero’s @bkero DIY Electric Bike. Really cool stuff, and something that I really want to expand on and connect even more tech, similar to this plus something like Helios Bars.

Next up…

Terraformer

Terraformer is a project kicked off by Jerry Sievert @jerrysievert that provides some pretty solid mapping toolkit. For more information on this project, check out these links:

Hacker Lounge

During and after all the sessions OS Bridge is fairly well known for its awesome Hacker Lounge. Before many arrived, early in the morning just before the first keynote I snapped a wide angle of the Hacker Lounge…

Hacker Lounge, unoccupied.

…and here’s a few shots of the Hacker Lounge in full effect.

A wide angle of activity ala the Hacker Lounge. Click for full size image.

…the Lego table for solutions…

Lego table!

…and hardware hacking.

Hardware hacking, a little soldering brings together different worlds.

…if you are deciding what to attend this year, here’s the top of the list.

Just a few key conferences that will kick ass in technical & academic content. The other great thing about these conferences is that they either have a “code of ethics” or are reknown for real conference diversity vs. the “hey a bunch of privileged sameness all ended up in this room purely out of meritocracy” nonsense. So you can rest assured that at these conferences you’ll have interesting conversations, be actively involved in things that will expand our personal sphere of the world and in the end leave you dramatically more enriched than those “corporate warm body vacation conferences“. This list doesn’t mean I’ll be able to make it to all of them, but each conference I’m in some way intimately involved with and fully support with the “Conference Seal of Approval“! So here we go…

Write the Docs – April 8th and 9th – @writethedocs – A new movement, to know where we are, where we’ve been and where we’re going. Get here, know how and why to bring knowledge forth through documentation. This is not your grandpa’s documentation.

Portland RailsConf 2013 – April 29th-May 2nd – @railsconf – The rails community has grown by leaps and bounds. Regardless of your love or hate for the framework, it’s revolutionized the way web applications are built over the last decade.

RICON East in New York City – May 13th & 14th – @basho – (I do work for Basho, but this is on here because RICON last year ROCKED and meets the requirements, come see for yourself!) :)

Node PDX – May 16th & 17th – @nodepdx – Troy Howard and I are putting this together, we’re working hard to make sure it’s more of what you want, more than it was last year and kicking to the curb the things you don’t want. So come hack some node, JavaScript and enjoy yourselves.

Polyglot 2013 – May 24th through the 26th – @polyglotConf – Open spaces, with tons of really, truly smart people with no presumptuous marketing and sales bullshit to get in the way. This is about software development, across the realms of frameworks, languages and more.

OS Bridge – June 18th through the 21st – @osbridge – open source bridges the divide here and new thinking is created. You have to attend to see…

OSCON – July 22nd through the 26th – @oscon – This is the premier open source conference in North America. It’s in Portland. Nuff’ said.

I’ll be at a few more conferences this year, but these are the key conferences, if you have to pick one to go to, it should be on this list. If you can go to one or two others, pick em’ from this list. Software + Data + Giant Phat Data + NoSQL + Future Thinking + Leaders o’ Thoughts == Top Conference List.

Alright… deep breath. The last few weeks, no wait, the last few months have been hella busy. I finally got my act together and have set some real goals. One of them is stepping up to bat in the Cloud Computing/Utility Computing Industry, instead of just being a mere critique, writer, and sideline gazer I’ll be in the full battle on Monday. The reason Monday, is because today is my last official day at Russell Investments.

Beautiful Russell Investments Building in Seattle

Working at Russell has been awesome. The team I got to work with regularly used advanced practices (which I like to think of as practices that everybody uses, but I’m aware of reality) – such as TDD, BDD, and Pairing. We did a mild form of Scrum, mostly to help leadership manage to the even higher up management. It works really well. We have happy customers, solid products, a deployment success rate that never had us at work late, and to top it off I got to work on net profitable projects. I love seeing success across the board!

The the guys I worked with the most pairing, TDDing & BDDing, and generally making the math work – Jeff Schumacher @codereflection & Scott Koon @lazycoder – cheers, beers on me in the near future (like at 2:00pm!). To the host of others…

Kelly – Thanks for that whitty sardonic 5-year old humor that I love and adore! You kick ass!

Don – Thanks for keeping the QA ship headed in the right direction and helping me coordinate, get things out the door, and providing comraderie every day.

James – Test, QA, thanks for destroying any hope that a bug may make it to production. Keep throwing out those lines of Russian to scare the passersby, superb indeed!

Chris Sjoholm – Thanks for troubleshooting JavaScript, enjoying the TekPub jQuery Videos, and hacking the jQuery/JavaScript until it works. …and I had to use your name because nobody can say it! mwhahahahaahahaa!

Castle – Thanks for confusing me by having the name Castle, since we use Castle Windsor, and oh yeah, thanks for being a very knowledge domain person ( <- Note I’m not in HR, I didn’t call you a “resource” ). Your random jabs, jests, and relaxed vibe always brought ++ to the work day.

Lane – Dude, seriously, boss++, awesome, ski dude, punk rocker, gets wooed and honored in Seattle Coffee Works, great guy, rock star, Scrum King, Lean Advocate, Get Shit Done Well guy… I think I summed ya up. Thanks a billion! You going to bat to destroy the insanity that is TFS I will never forget!

Jeff – Thanks for the coding, helping me think, and the death metal, black metal, Deicide show (along with attempts to make other shows, which I fail miserably at), etc… You rock dude, keep it up, never stop, stay a little crazy, it’ll make those bus rides all that much more fun. ;)

John & Terry – You guys were like the silent brain trust, with Terry piping in with the announcement that Corp IT does some inanely illogical things, for the whole floor. I seriously have enjoyed your public service announcements! John, thanks for all the awesome food suggestions over the last year +.

Sree – Rock that Mac dude, enjoy your family, and stay that happy guy you are. Keep hitting the code and love the coder life.

Sai – Hey wait, where’d you go? Oh yeah, enjoy the Bellevue. It was fun, I learned that there are only like 5 countries that have people driving on the wrong side of the road because of you!! :P But seriously, great working with you, see ya around for sure!

Skoon, Scott, I mean Scott Koon – Ok, had to use your whole name because of all the iterations we’ve used over the many months. Needless to say, Herding Code rocks…

Cefe – You, the invisible power that be, to right wrongs and keep the ship sailing, we didn’t get to work together that much, but I always felt a very positive morale with you at the helm. Cheers, will miss working under your command.

Hassan – Again, like Cefe, thanks for commanding the ship from the strategic command center on high. You also, kept our morale up, kept the alignments clear, and led us to the battle.

Scott S. – Thanks for the NSFW jokes, connections, networking knowledge, etc. You’ve been a great comrade, will miss ya… and yes, I’m still working on the logistics around Alaska, keep me abreast in Facebook if ya would. Cheers! Thanks for those other things too. ;)

Aeden – Sucks we didn’t get to pair together, we’ll do that soon, at a conference or something! Keep it wild, stay adventurous, and enjoy the Indian Food.

Lisa – Thanks for the NSFW moments, the Shadow IT, and the snarky comments. The whole team enjoys your input into the kittie cats these days, so don’t stop. Cheers! …and thanks for the chance to further infect the company with the awesomeness that is Shadow IT!

…but where am I going?

There are some secrets that will remain. Such as what specific companies I’m going to work with, who, where, what, and why, that will stay a mystery at this point. There are a few things that are happening that I can and will elaborate on right now. (if you were waiting for something technology related, this is the part, sorry for all the sobbing and tearful moments above). For the others topics, I’ll provide a juicy update in the near future (I’m thinking in about 1-2 months).

Cloud Foundry

Over the coming months I will be doing extensive work with, and maybe even on, Cloud Foundry. Will it be with Ruby, C#, or JavaScript? Well, actually it will be a little of all three. Yes indeed.

Cloud Architecture

This is an area where I’ll be doing a ton of work, related almost entirely to PaaS (Platform as a Service). I will have blog entries coming about this topic through various medium, which will include my ongoing series on New Relic’s Blog (Part 1 & Part 2 of Removing the OS Barrier with PaaS which is up now). In addition, there will definitely be a lot of open source software in my future!

TriMet Light Rail

Community

One of the things that is hugely important to me is community. Local community, tech community, neighborhood community, and city community. With that there are a few other changes that will be pretty big for me over the next few months. I’m making a huge shift where and how I’m going to be living. I’ll be spending a whole lot of time in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and likely Vancouver BC, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen. There is a strong connecting fiber for all of these cities around livability and building strong communities, something a lot of other cities lack. But one slight change, since my home base is in Seattle currently, is that I’ll still be very active in Seattle but will be making my home base Portland again, with living arrangements for my frequent visits available in Seattle and San Francisco. To summarize, I’ll be swapping some bus commutes for light rail & streetcar commutes! :) Thx to all who are helping me out with this complexity!

Panoramic Portland - Click for a massive full size image

Tech Community

Along with this slight shift in geographic location & traveling a lot more I’ve been pushing forward (you might have realized from the string of speaker introductions) on getting events organized. I’m thinking that this will become a recurring habit of mine since I sincerely enjoy the work I do and meeting, coding, and helping people to build a larger community of technology mega-awesomeness!

Which brings me to my last mention, go RSVP for Node PDX, it’s going to be a good time!

So all in all, cheers, and on to new great things and working to making a little dent in this universe. :D